Posts tagged EFF

Chris Meadows reported almost a year ago to the day on the invidious attempts by US trade negotiators in hock to Big Media vested interests to impose onerous copyright, intellectual property, and public domain restrictions worldwide via the Trans-Pacific Partnership - in secret, without negotiation or public consultation. Sad to say, a year on very little has changed, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has revealed courtesy of a leaked document on the TPP state of play.
As the EFF says:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United...

Honestly, I hadn't even heard about this until I woke up this morning and checked my phone, but apparently today—that's Friday, May 3, 2013—is something of a holiday in the digital publishing community. It's the fifth annual International Day Against DRM. Huh.
The organization behind the holiday—which in reality is more of an awareness-raising movement—is known as Defective by Design. As the DBD website explains, "We are a participatory and grassroots campaign exposing DRM-encumbered devices and media for what they really are: Defective by Design. We are working together to eliminate DRM as a threat to innovation in media, the privacy of...

The Humble Indie E-Book Bundle’s sale period is over. It raised over $1.2 million on over 84,000 sales, with an average purchase price of $14.28—an altogether impressive amount. Participating author John Scalzi has a couple of post-mortem posts on his blog looking at the reasons for it.
Scalzi sees the keys to the Humble E-Book Bundle’s success as being the Humble Bundle brand reputation based on past success, a well-curated bundle featuring titles with mass geek appeal, the absence of DRM, the charity involvement, its overall uniqueness, and the pay-what-you-want and limited-time-offer gimmicks. All these factors combined to make the bundle...

A brief follow-up to my latest post about copyright troll Righthaven’s travails: Wendy Davis at the Daily Online Examiner reports that the EFF has helped one of Righthaven’s defendants, the Democratic Underground, file suit against Stephens Media, the company that launched Righthaven and licensed or sold it its copyright, to obtain a declaratory judgment that the posting of a five-sentence excerpt from a 50-sentence article counted as fair use and therefore Stephens had no right to sic Righthaven on them. After Stephens conceded, the judge ruled against the company, and the Democratic Underground and EFF are now eligible...

Following up to the privacy concerns about Amazon’s “Silk” browser, the EFF spoke with Amazon and asked some questions about privacy-related matters. The EFF’s Dan Auerbach reports coming away from the conversation mostly satisfied with Amazon’s measures, with only a couple of major privacy concerns remaining. Amazon explained that Silk does not intercept encrypted traffic—HTTPS browsing sessions go directly from the Kindle Fire to the website without passing through Amazon’s EC2 servers. As for logging of requests that do pass through EC2, Amazon explains it only logs the URL of the page, a timestamp, and a session-identification token. There...

Did I just hear the DMCA’s anti-circumvention precisions creak a little? Ars Technica reports that a judge has ruled educational institutions are legally entitled to rip and stream DVDs that they have legally purchased. The case involves UCLA ripping and streaming some educational DVDs from Ambrose Video Publishing. Ambrose sued over the anti-circumvention provision violation, insisting its DVDs were sold under a licensing agreement that prohibits rebroadcast and public display. However, the UCLA insisted that fair use gave it the right to rip and stream, and that Ambrose’s catalog specifically says “All purchases by schools and libraries include...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that the California Reader Privacy Act has been signed into law. The act “will establish privacy protections for book purchases [including e-book purchases] similar to long-established privacy laws for library records.” While the EFF trumpets this as a victory for reader privacy, Death and Taxes Magazine points out that it is still superseded at the federal level by the Patriot Act. Given that elsewhere the EFF reports a US attorney demanded the book purchase records of 24,000 customers from Amazon, this is troubling. It seems doubtful the EFF will have much luck counteracting...

An EFF press release trumpets the introduction of a bill in the California state legislature that would require a warrant or court order for access to sensitive reading records of both print and electronic books. The Reader Privacy Act of 2011 (SB 602) is backed by the ACLU and the EFF, and brings book-related privacy matters up to par with existing privacy and free speech safeguards in the state constitution and other state law. As Californians increasingly rely on online services to browse, read, and buy books, it is essential that state law keep pace and...

Over the last few days, the EFF has been looking back at predictions it made at the beginning of the year to see how they have played out. Most of these have relatively little to do with e-reading (though the one on hardware hacking does touch on it orthogonally with mention of the exemption created for jailbreaking iPhones), but one of them looks specifically at books and newspapers. At the beginning of the year, the EFF noted the increasing complaints of publishers and publishing magnates such as Rupert Murdoch about the effect the Internet was having on their bottom...

Although this is not directly about e-books, it uses the economics of digital media in a way similar to some e-book charity efforts, and reiterates an important point about digital piracy. Back in May, I reported on the “Humble Indie Bundle”, a pack of five games that a group of indie developers was offering for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a name-your-own-price download. The group of developers has come out with a second bundle, the “Humble Indie Bundle #2”, and once more the proceeds are being split among the developers and charities EFF and Child’s Play. (This time,...

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website:
With the 2010 holidays upon us, it's time to update EFF's E-Book Buyer's Guide to E-Book Privacy, which summarizes and comments on the privacy-related policies of several e-readers.
What's new. We've added in the iPad and also added in the software used by many libraries and devices for e-book access, made by Adobe called Adobe Content Server. Adobe doesn't keep a list of libraries that use their software, but it does have a list of supported devices. Remember that the list only tells you what information is available to Adobe, not what information may be made...